Last weekend I read an intriguing article in the Dutch newspaper, NRC. A communication researcher, Tjardus van Citters, wanted to give us all well-meaning advice. (Dutch titel: 'Welgemeend advies van een communicatie-expert: minder communicatie, s.v.p', Sept. 20, 2009.)His article gives an overview of the sources that are increasing the number of signals we process each day. For instance the number of communication providers has increased. And the fact that our senses are being addressed more than ever.This overview leads to his advice to communicate less. Why? Because our health is at stake. Our brains get more impulses to process. The model of 'selective perception' is out-dated. We get irritated by communication we did not want to see, leading to restlessness, even illness.He therefore advises us to turn off signals. Read the news once a week instead of every few hours. Unsubscribe to things you don't want to receive. Be clear what kind of emails you don't …

Thomas Friedman in The World is Flat and Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams in Wikinomics have predicted that the way companies will recruit people will be fundamentally different in the future.In the past the model was easy: Get the best and brightest people to work for you. Of course these new employees would move close to your company and work inside the firewall as much as possible.Of course we've seen some movement in this area. Outsourcing of jobs to India or China. Tele-commuting, working-more-from-home, etc.At first I thought it looked like Google has taken this a step further. But this is fake (Twitter spam...). But the idea is great and got me thinking. In short the site said: Everyone with a computer and a broadband connection can work for us right from their homes. (And aren't we already, but clicking on links!? ;-)) Seriously, this could be interesting and big in my opinion. This 'offer' is 'only' focused on the US and Canada. But what if - and I…

Professor Henry Mintzberg has an interesting article in the HBR of July-August 2009 titled: 'Rebuilding Companies as Communities'. (Isn't it too bad these articles are readable by all, even non-subscribers?)Reading this article brought back memories of Etienne Wenger's book, 'Communities of Practice'. That book was a big eye-opener to me, introducing me to 'social worlds theory', companies staring as communities, communities that just exist (and can't be formed) in communities, etc.To Mintzberg Community means:... caring about our work, our colleagues, and our place in the world, geographic and otherwise, and in turn being inspired by this caring.He proposes a new word: "Communityship" to underline the importance of on the one hand individual leadership and on the other side collective citizenship. Communityship should make...... use of leadership, but not the egocentric, 'heroic' kind that has become so prevalent in the business w…

This provoking statement popped up after reading Robin Hamman's post, 'Social media monitoring - more first step than end game'.Of course some people start sighing when they hear 'social media' and 'web 2.0'. What's the idea of this new stuff and why should I get into it? Robin quotes his Headshift colleague Lee Bryant saying:If you look at a longer timeframe, you will see that our new era of social technology and social business is in fact more traditional, and continues very old, resilient models of network-based trade, business and socialisation. The difference is, we now have the technology and infrastructure (and arguably the globalised world) that enables us to scale up these old ways of working to support our modern life.Robin goes on to say:In short, consumers can and should be closely involved in the co-creation, testing, reﬁnement and marketing of products and services - something that nearly always involves a conversation - and social tools a…

A colleague of mine kindly pointed me to an interesting report: "The Rise of the Digital C-Suite. How executives locate and filter business information'. It's a Forbes Insight report, sponsored by Google.To be clear, this report is about how executives look for and process external information. Information that is on the web. It would be very interesting to read a comparable report on how execs do the same for internal information. I think it's the case for many execs they're too busy to follow and look for external trends anyway. Surprisingly more than 60% of the execs said they accessed the Internet for business intelligence on a daily basis.Another interesting part of the report is how execs use web 2.0. For the 50+ category 80% or more didn't maintain a blog or tweet. Only 26% of the 'under 40' category didn't tweet.RSS is not used much at all over all categories. Only 40% of the 'under 40' category for instance. Which regrettably relat…

On the 4th of November the second Knowledge Management meeting 'Made in Holland' will be held at the University of Twente! Last time - the first time - I was there and blogged about the presentations. I really enjoyed it.
This time I hope to be there again. And... I'll be one of the presenters! I'll be talking about our 'enterprise wiki' initiatives. Looking forward to it.
The meeting is open to all. It's focused on Dutch KM researchers and practitioners. So if you want to come, just leave a comment and I'll get you in contact with the organizers.Tags van Technorati: km,knowledge management,wiki

A couple of weeks ago I was enjoying my summer vacation in England. One day we went to Oxford with the family. There you have great bookstore, called Blackwell. Ever been there? It's huge!Then I saw their slogan and thought I'd take a picture of it for you. Their slogan is: The Knowledge Retailer.I love that slogan. This slogan would fit most companies with knowledge workers. But doesn't this also fit the knowledge worker in general. Isn't that what we do: retail knowledge?Tags van Technorati: knowledge worker

It's been a while ago I wrote about an interesting piece by Larry Sanger on the Edge blog. That article questioned "the "epistemic egalitarianism" adagium of Wikipedia." In my words: "everybody is equal, an expert is not more (knowledgeable) than a non-expert, together we define what it true."This article by Sanger and my post about it, popped up in my mind when Wikipedia changed its policy so "the unwashed masses will no longer be able to directly edit the profiles of famous living people", as Chris Wilson phrases it on Slate. Of course this move was widely debated. The Slate article gives a nice summary, as does the NY Times.My first thought about this move is nicely stated by Wilson:No matter how you spin this new policy, there's no getting around that it gives more power and control to a small group of people. But if this were a big problem, Wikipedia would have flopped a long time ago. As I've argued before, the encyclopedia…

As you may know I enjoy reading books. I try to review them on my blog every now and then. After finishing a book I regularly stop and think who else could be interested in this book (employees and friends). Sometimes I also wish I could discuss its contents and translate it to the company I work for, for instance.I was wondering: Are there companies you know of, that do this structurally? Is that encouraged by management or was this initiated by employees (bottom-up)? And how are those group book reviews organized? Are the conclusions disseminated in any way?I know Google has something in this direction, Authors@Google, which is very interesting. The talk itself is clearly shared via Youtube. The non-Google-related questions from the audience are also shared. The Google-related ones are not. But what does Google do with the answers to those questions? Does Google try to implement the author's findings if possible?Love the picture taken from the NY Times, by the way!Tags van Tech…

Regularly I give presentations to colleagues. I'm not always happy with the way my presentations go. Sometimes I loose track of time. Or I don't get the point I wanted to make across. Etc.For some time now I'm practicing a new presentation strategy that really works for me. I didn't read any books or articles on the topic. And didn't go to a presentation course (- but I hope to shortly!). So, maybe my approach is dead-wrong. If so, please tell me. And if you have other tips and tricks you want to share, please leave a comment.Most of the time I get a limited amount of time to give the presentation. Say 30 minutes. My new approach to presenting is like this:I start a document (not a new slide!).I write down the rough outline of the presentation in short lines of text.Then I start detailing that outline. I literally write down what I want to say. This is my script.Then I read the text and time it. Once in silence and once out loud. If that fits into the time I got fo…

Say something happens and you hear about it on TV or you read about it on the web. This topic really interests you and you wonder how it will end. For instance a murder case.As you know lots of topics start on one day, but don't end until months later. How do you keep track of them? Do you just bump into its 'solution' on tv or the web? Or do you have some way of tracking that topic?Wouldn't it be interesting if you could just point to the article or video about the topic and say: subscribe to all articles about this topic. A topic-RSS feed. Of course you can do this for big topics, using hashtags in Twitter for instance. And you can also define a query and subscribe to that feed, using Google Alerts for instance. But for smaller topics it's not that easy.Or am I missing something? Or do you know of apps that already solve this problem?Tags van Technorati: news,search,tracking,rss,feeds